What is the Archimedean point of morality?
It has been very enjoyable to post on LW [1, 2] and I have learned a lot from the discussions with other members, for which I am very thankful. But unfortunately, judging by my karma score which is on the same level of Kiwiallegiance and the Jewelry spammer, my opinions are not appreciated and I frequently receive the following message when posting a new comment:
You are trying to submit too fast. try again in xn minutes.
When I press the submit button after x1 + 1 minutes, I’m told to wait another x2 minutes. So commenting has become more and more frustating, and I don’t want to continue burden the LW members with the heavy tast of down-voting me. But on the other hand, I still can’t find any flaw in my argumentation despite many rebuttals. Maybe I am too ignorant, maybe I am on something. So I’ll give myself a last try.
There is none. Some say that morality is a system that is most conductive to cooperation and thus biological fitness. Others say, it is something society creates to enable its own survival. These are explanations that try to reduce morality (values, desires and dislikes) to the concepts of the natural world, but they don’t capture what we really mean by desires, dislikes and values.
You might explain my desire for pancakes as a neuronal process, as a mental function biologically evolved, but it does not capture the meaning of “desire”. The concept of meaning itself has no meaning in the natural world, but it has a meaning to us, to the rational mind.
As much as we cannot explain what the natural world “really” is, since we cannot see what is behind the physical reality (unless you are an idealistic Platonist), we cannot explain what morality and values “really” are. We can only describe them using scientific theories or normative theories, respectively.
I have a hard time understanding what you’re saying in this and the last post. You need to play more rationalist taboo.
It would be nice to follow the same advice ourselves and not bombard newbies with lesswrong-specific jargon they probably don’t understand. At the very least, we should provide links to a description. Such as Rationalist Taboo.
I was just going to say that I had already linked him to that page in a previous reply to him, but it turns out I linked a different page. Oops. :[ Good call.
Isn’t that what the wiki is supposed to be?
Sorry I edited the above post and was working on it when you must’ve replied to the unedited post. The wiki (and even the FAQ) basically just says “and here’s all the sequences that you can read.” Yeah, I get that there’s inferential distance between a completely new participant (such as draq) and the rest of the LW community, but I think it would be useful to have a short guide that serves as a brief introduction to LW.
This guide could also serve as a solid primer on LW core tenets and community norms for participants who really don’t need to trudge through all of the sequences, but might be able to pick up the ideas much more quickly: something like the mind projection fallacy, which was particularly easy to understand, and could’ve really been explained in a paragraph or two.
I agree.
I’m not sure I’m intrepid enough to summarize even just the core sequences, so perhaps instead we could just make a list of the most important posts. Something like “if you only have time to read 5-10 posts, read these.” We could maybe divide it further into something like this:
Core Principles
your intuitions are not magic
beliefs should pay rent
words can be wrong
It would be nice to have a summary of How to Actually Change Your Mind but it’s also quite long, consisting of several subsequences. It would be a major effort to summarize this.
Tools
Rationalist taboo
Least convenient possible world
Reversal test
This list is incomplete, so let me know which important posts I’m missing
Are you asking me to use a certain LW-inside vocabulary? In that case, a dictionary would be helpful. Which specific word or phrase is not clear to you?
Or are you holding a logical positivist position that some words or context does not have any meaning at all?
The idea of rationalist taboo is not to use LW-inside vocabulary. On the contrary, one lesson of rationalist taboo is that we should be able to reduce LW-inside vocabulary to non-LW-inside vocabulary. If we can’t do that, we’re doing rationalism wrong.
You may want to look at the metaethics sequence, especially this post, since it sounds that you might be saying something similar in different language. Of course, you’ll probably need to read most of the metaethics sequence up to that point to understand that post.
It appears that you think that there is something ineffable about the concepts of morality and values. Your arguments here don’t support that position.
You dispute a couple explanations of morality and related terms, apparently because they don’t match the way we hold and manipulate these concepts in our minds.
Concepts that we hold in our mind are highly connected to our emotions, memories, and experiences. These thoughts are highly individualized, and thinking them generates recurrent patterns that interact with our mind and body. We can actually “feel” the concept of desire. A devout Buddhist thinks about “desire” in a very different way than a devout Christian.
So it is to be expected that explanations of morality would not capture all aspects of our internal sense of that concept. The explanations probably only capture the elements of morality that were essential to their context of discussion.
This does not show that the concepts of morality and values are ineffable. You have incorrectly compared meaning between incompatible contexts.
Your beliefs about morality appear to stem from your belief about “mental phenomena”. As you state it here:
I suggest that this belief incorrectly biases your other beliefs.